A study on the genetic diversity and subpopulation structure of three Bulgarian mountainous sheep breeds, based on genotyping of microsatellite markers

Odjakova, Tsonka; Todorov, Pavel; Kalaydzhiev, Georgi; Salkova, Delka; Dundarova, Heliana; Radoslavov, Georgi; Hristov, Peter

doi:10.1016/j.smallrumres.2023.107034

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“…To date, the majority of studies on the genetic diversity among native Bulgarian sheep have been performed only on autosomal short tandem repeat variations (STR, microsatellites) [39][40][41][42][43][44]. In this research, carried out in 2023, we evaluated for the first time the genetic diversity of eight native Bulgarian sheep breeds which are threatened with extinction, based on the sequence polymorphism of the mitochondrial control region (D-loop region).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mitochondrial Diversity and Phylogenetic Relationship of Eight Native Bulgarian Sheep Breeds

Kalaydzhiev,

Palova,

Dundarova

et al. 2023

Animals

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The geographical, geomorphological, and climatic characteristics of Bulgaria are particularly favorable for animal breeding and, above all, for pastoral farming and sheep breeding. These conditions created prerequisites for the creation of about 30 unique local breeds of sheep. In this study we investigated the genetic diversity of eight of the most popular Bulgarian native breeds, based on the sequence analysis of a part of the mitochondrial D-loop region. An almost entire mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) D-loop region (1180 bp) was amplified and sequenced. The obtained results showed the presence of a large number of haplotypes–225, belonging to two main haplogroups. The majority of samples showed a high prevalence of the European haplogroup B (95.2%) while the remaining individuals were assigned to haplogroup A (4.8%). None of the other reported mitochondrial haplogroups were observed. The number of polymorphic sites, nucleotide and haplotype diversity was high (240, 0.01237, and 0.9968, respectively), which is evidence for multiple maternal origins in all populations. The Tajima D-test value in all the study populations was −1.905 (p < 0.05), indicating that the abundance of rare alleles was most likely due to population expansion after a recent bottleneck. The Median joining network showed that almost all haplotypes belonging to haplogroup B formed a star-like network, which revealed a weak genetic differentiation and a large gene flow between the Bulgarian native breeds.

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